Munich Re

Thanks to George Carty for pointing us to the Energy From Thorium Discussion Forum, where someone named Klaus Allmendinger has spotted something strange in the small print of a new report from WWF and Allianz insurance that claims to rank G8 countries in terms of their progress towards CO2 emissions targets:

… When noticing France AND Germany in similar places on the list, I looked a little further. France, according to this report, has still fairly high emissions from electricity production. A small footnote under one of the graphs though explains why:

“1 WWF does not consider nuclear power to be a viable policy option. The indicators “emissions per capita”, “emissions per GDP” and “CO2 per kWh electricity” for all countries have therefore been adjusted as if the generation of electricity from nuclear power had produced 350 gCO2/kWh (emission factor for natural gas). Without the adjustment, the original indicators for France would have been much lower, e.g. 86 gCO2/kWh.”

So basically, France’s CO2 emissions from electricity production are produced by ideological bias, not by fossil fuel combustion. It looks like the German emissions are lower than actual tons of CO2 also because of emission trading schemes. Allianz is of course also a trader in CO2 certificates.

It seems like the new battle-cry is: Enrons of the world, unite !!!

Not only does the report clearly not do what it claims to do, and not only is this another instance of Big Insurance joining forces with Big Environment to whip up alarm (not to mention premiums) about environmental risks (Allianz join Munich Re, RMS and Catlin), but, by ranking countries in terms of energy – rather than CO2 – production, it also supports our suggestion that Environmentalism has less to do with saving the planet than it does with reining in human aspirations.

Bob Ward is at it again. In an article for the Guardian, he writes that – shock, horror – ExxonMobil continues to fund organisations he disagrees with, even though he has told them not to.

A few weeks ago, ExxonMobil revealed that it made contributions in 2008 to lobby groups such as the National Center for Policy Analysis and the Heritage Foundation in order to “promote informed discussion”. So I have now written again to ExxonMobil to point out that these organisations publish misleading information about climate change on their websites

Ward, you might remember, started writing letters of complaint to the likes of Exxon when he was Director of Communications at the Royal Society, who supplied him with headed note-paper. He continued his crusade after taking up the post of Director of Global Science Networks at global risk insurance firm RMS. And he shows no sign of stopping now that he’s Policy and Communications Director at Professor Lord Sir Nicholas Stern’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the LSE.

The Guardian deems Ward’s article important enough to get its staff environment reporter to write an article about the fact that Ward has written an article:

The world’s largest oil company is continuing to fund lobby groups that question the reality of global warming, despite a public pledge to cut support for such climate change denial, a new analysis shows.

Company records show that ExxonMobil handed over hundreds of thousands of pounds to such lobby groups in 2008. These include the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) in Dallas, Texas, which received $75,000 (£45,500), and the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, which received $50,000.

According to Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, at the London School of Economics, both the NCPA and the Heritage Foundation have published “misleading and inaccurate information about climate change.”

‘Hundreds of thousands of pounds’. Gosh. Compared to the sums made available for climate alarmism, even the ~$45 million paid out by Exxon over the course of a decade (according to Greenpeace’s Exxonsecrets website) is chicken feed. One only needs to compare it to the amount given by Ward’s benefactor, Jeremy Grantham, to put things into perspective. As a Sunday Times article revealed recently:

So concerned is Grantham, 70, over this issue that he has set up the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, endowed with £165m of his own money, to fund environmental research and campaigns. From it he is funding the LSE and Imperial donations, and other grants to American groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund.

So, just one individual has given nearly five times more in one lump to the green cause than Exxon (a petro-chemicals giant) is alleged to have given over the course of a decade. Nevermind the $billions at the disposal of the giant green NGOs such as WWF, and Greenpeace – many of which enjoy cosy relationships with governments and the EU, who go so far as paying such groups to lobby them.

According to Grantham:

Capitalism and business are going to have to remodel themselves and adapt to a rapidly changing and eventually very different world.

Says the… erm… Capitalist businessman. But whose interests will the remodelling of global capitalism and business serve?

Ward, of course, has his own interests served by elevating poorly-funded networks of ‘deniers’ to the status of global capitalist conspiracy. It gives the impression that there’s actually an organised challenge to the increasing influence of environmental ideology, giving him a role as its inquisitor. Thus, the image of the brave Ward standing against evil corporate conspiracies (with billionaires standing behind him, out of focus) gives such environmental ideology the appearance of socially-progressive radicalism.

Yet, arguably, Exxon are the ones doing the social good here, donating such sums that, if only in a small way, create the possibility of debate that has been so far dominated by the interests of the super-wealthy – the Goldsmiths, Prince Charles, the Tickells, Gore, and so on. Why should we take their word for it that their influence, and the influence of the institutions they lobby for, and fund, and direct, are operating in our interests?

Moreover, Ward’s accusations about the corrupting influence of corporate dollars can be thrown right back at him. From his HQ at the LSE, Ward’s boss Nick Stern runs both the Grantham and the Centre for Climate Change, Economics and Policy (CCCEP). While Ward’s employment is ostensibly with the Grantham, he also doubles up as PR man for the CCCEP. The CCCEP is funded jointly by the UK’s research councils and risk insurance giants Munich Re.

The close association between climate alarmists and the insurance industry is no less natural than that between ‘sceptics’ and Exxon. Just as Exxon might be expected to play down the threat of climate change when it suits them, Munich Re can be relied upon to overstate the dangers. Fear of risk is to the insurance industry what oil is to Exxon.

The difference is that Bob Ward doesn’t write letters of complaint to Munich Re insurers or articles for the Guardian when Munich Re disseminates ‘misleading and inaccurate information about climate change’ – which they surely do.

While Big Oil dishes out a few quid to a handful of pressure groups on the political fringes, Big Insurance conducts its business safely ensconced within the political, academic and scientific establishment. Its own brand of misleading and inaccurate information is acceptable simply because it does not conflict with the political goals of the environmental elite. Indeed, that same misleading and inaccurate information becomes central to the environmental cause, forming the basis of, for example, Kofi Annan’s much-publicised report ‘demonstrating’ that 300,000 people per year are dying as a result of climate change.

To take Exxon funding is to attract accusations of ‘denialism’, but to be funded by Munich Re is something to be proud of, to the extent that esteemed academic institutions such as the LSE want to tell the world about it:

New world-leading Grantham Research Institute opens for business as LSE joins forces with Munich Re on climate change

The £millions available to Ward and his colleagues have improved neither the quality of their arguments nor their popularity with the electorate. No wonder they are terrified that Exxon are still funding ‘deniers’. Grantham ought to ask for his money back. Surely, if ‘deniers’ were engaged in prostituting their intellectual resources for pure profit, the best way to ensure that the environmental message got heard would be to pay them to switch sides. After all, in spite of the $billions that have been made available to green causes, it’s only (allegedly) taken Exxon $45m to undo all that ‘good’ work.

It is telling that parts of the environmental movement attempt to ram home their message by telling the rest of the world that they are stupid for not getting it.

As we have shown here on Climate Resistance, some argue that psychological mechanisms might be to blame for our failure to respond to climate change, and devise techniques that might ‘encourage’ us to behave ‘responsibly’. Others claim that the feckless public’s scepticism and denial are the result of conspiracies to distort science’s message, or that a ‘balance’ of views in the media gives a credibility to false ideas. Some even say that the issue of climate change is just too serious and big an issue for democracy to cope with – we vote selfishly, and our sinful minds cannot possibly understand the enormity of the tragedy that we are making. What fools we are.

But the last thing those who make such claims ever look at to explain their failure is their own argument. So who are they calling stupid?

All of us, it seems. One such case is ‘The Age of Stupid’ – a film that points its big pointy finger at the people of the world, and damns them for their stupidity.

Franny Armstrong, the director of the film, was at the Hay Festival last weekend, sharing the stage with climate change minister, Ed Miliband. As the Guardian’s James Randerson reports:

What we saw on stage was a clash between the absolutism of the single-minded campaigner and the art of realpolitik. For Armstrong the situation is clear. Already, 150,000 people are dying each year as a result of human-caused climate change – according to the World Health Organisation – so the consumerist growth model that has created the problem has to go.

But, countered Miliband, that would deny developing countries like China and India their chance to grow their economies. “If you say to them look, we’ve had this growth model for 50 years or whatever it is but now we’ve discovered it’s a real problem and you can’t carry on growing, there’s no way to can persuade them to be part of a global agreement,” he said.

Here is what they said to each other, according to the Guardian’s podcast coverage of the festival:

MILIBAND: Even after the recession, even after putting a price on carbon, passenger demand in the UK is expected to double. Now your position says, err…

ARMSTRONG: Ninety-five per cent cut in flights by 2020.

MILIBAND: You’d like a ninety-five per cent cut in flights?

ARMSTRONG: Yep. No, the science… It doesn’t matter what I’d like… If we’re going to prevent runaway climate change, which is the goal. Then ninety-five percent cut in flights, yeah. But I think what you said is absolutely key. Like it was only one generation ago, perhaps two [laughs] that err, flying was a magical once-in-a-lifetime experience that you’d look forward to. You know, you’d save up, and you’d go, you know, once a decade. That’s what we’re talking about, everybody in the room could fly about once a decade. And then wed be back to being a magical experience and what’s wrong with that? I think we have to look at the level of sacrifice, don’t we, because what we’re saying is you think the British people wouldn’t agree to sacrifice [laughs] erm, their right to go on holiday as many times as they… fly, as many times as they want to.

MILIBAND: But…

ARMSTRONG: Hang on, let me finish. But in order… We’re therefore gonna ask other people in other countries to sacrifice their lives. I.E. the hundred and fifty thousand people who are already dying from climate change every year, according to the World Health Organisation.

MILIBAND: I’m not saying that, come on. I’m not saying that.

ARMSTRONG: No but you are. One follows the other.

This exchange epitomises the climate ‘debate’ in a number of ways.

First, it isn’t a debate. Miliband and Armstrong’s positions are not counterposed. Miliband is nothing if not a committed environmentalist. Yet he recognises that what both he and Armstrong want ain’t a vote-winner, and the public remain unconvinced about the environmental issue. Knowing that environmental policies therefore lack the legitimacy such far-reaching policies ought to have, he recently called for the green movement to demonstrate the kind of mass-movement that has driven political change in the past. As he said last year:

When you think about all the big historic movements, from the suffragettes, to anti-apartheid, to sexual equality in the 1960s, all the big political movements had popular mobilization. Maybe it’s an odd thing for someone in government to say, but I just think there’s a real opportunity and a need here.

But the environmental movement cannot muster it. Too few people – only a small number of protesters and the UK establishment, it seems – are interested in the subject at all. Nonetheless, Miliband has been instrumental in driving forward the environmental agenda, which forms a substantial part of the government’s own legislation. Because it does suit the political establishment, it has proceeded without any real parliamentary scrutiny – virtually all MPs, with only a few exceptions, are entirely uncritical of anything ‘green’ – and without environmentalism being tested at the ballot box. This democratic oversight is overcome by deferring many of the parameters of our environmental strategy to an unaccountable, unelected panel – the Climate Change Committee, and of course, to the Stern Report, and to the IPCC; each papering over the nuances, doubt, uncertainties and scientific caution of the previous.

The second is the way Armstrong hides her naked prejudice behind science. It’s not her that wants a 95 per cent cut in flights, it’s science. It has spoken to her. But wherever Armstrong got her claim that a 95 per cent cut in flights is necessary to avoid ‘runaway climate change’ and the deaths of 150,000 people, it was not from scientific literature, and it was not from scientists. It’s an argument that has been assembled from bits of science, and strung together like a Frankenstein monster – a highly dubious form of inductive reasoning which allows her to claim that Miliband is making an argument for ‘other people in other countries to sacrifice their lives’. Her chain of reasoning is that i) flights cause CO2, ii) CO2 causes global warming, iii) which will cause runaway climate change, iv) which kills people – the WHO says so, v) these are mostly poor people in other countries. There is no sense of proportion at any stage of this form of reasoning. There is no attention given to the caveats and caution or scope that the original research – if indeed it was research – presented.

This is a major problem for Armstrong if she wants to persuade anybody who isn’t stupid. Anyone who isn’t stupid is able to see for themselves, with just a little research, how her argument stacks up, or doesn’t.

The statistic of 150,000 climate change deaths is from the WHO’s The World Health Report 2002, page 72 of which says:

Climate change was estimated to be responsible in 2000 for approximately 2.4% of worldwide diarrhoea, 6% of malaria in some middle income countries and 7% of dengue fever in some industrialized countries. In total, the attributable mortality was 154 000 (0.3%) deaths and the attributable burden was 5.5 million (0.4%) DALYs. About 46% this burden occurred in SEAR-D, 23% in AFR-E and a further 14% in EMR-D.

The book estimated climate change was to blame for 2.4 percent of cases of diarrhoea because, Campbell-Lendrum said, the heat would exacerbate bacterial contamination of food.

Climate change was also behind two percent of all cases of malaria, because increased rainfall created new breeding grounds for mosquitoes which carry the disease, he said.

There is a logical problem here with using a model to attribute deaths from cause A to ultimate cause B. By virtue of being directly caused by A, we cannot say empirically, that B was responsible for any particular death. The relationship between the cause of climate change, and an Nth order effect of climate change is theoretical, not empirical, and is itself based on a speculative chain of reasoning which is unlikely to carry much necessity. People who were killed by malaria, which was caused by an increased rainfall, which was caused by climate change, which was caused by somebody driving a 4×4 in South London, were killed, first and foremost, by malaria. The relationship between the ultimate cause (CO2) and ultimate effect (150,000 deaths from disease) – which we have to take at face value, because the WHO have decided not to tell us how it was established – is contingent: things could have happened otherwise. For instance, we might have abolished malaria and dengue fever, and the developing world might have been more developed such that more people had fridges and freezers, and medicine – very simple medicine, as it happens – to deal with diarrhoea. If that had happened – and it’s not a stretch of the imagination – there would have been no deaths from climate change. So why campaign for less cars, rather than more fridges and more medicine?

But let’s be charitable to the WHO and their researchers, for a moment. Perhaps there is a value in estimating the influence of climate changes on disease, based on assumptions. It might open up some discussion about strategies that might be followed to confront malaria, and where investments might be best made. Theoretical models aren’t in themselves, ‘bad’, and can be useful to testing existing knowledge, perhaps between different disciplines. But, look, these researchers aren’t as interested in the 98% of malaria cases which aren’t ’caused’ by climate change as the 2% that they assume is caused by climate change.

Even according to WHO’s own statistics, climate change is just about the least pressing problem for anyone in the developing world. Even being overweight or physically inactive in regions where we typically understand life to be characterised by scarcity of food, and hard physical labour are each bigger problems than climate change. The WHO table attributes 404,418 deaths in the high-mortality developing world to being overweight, nearly three times as many as it claims die from climate change (144,714). That’s nothing, of course, compared to the problem of being undernourished, which kills 5,610,300 – 38 times as many as climate change. Yet, arguably it is a much much easier problem to solve, at face value, than climate change. Moreover, the likes of Armstrong repeat the claim that ‘climate change is the biggest problem facing mankind’, and that ‘climate change will be worse for the poor’. Is this really the picture that emerges from this research?

To read the oft-quoted headlines that the WHO’s report had generated since being published in 2002, you’d have thought so.

A Google search for 150000 deaths climate change WHO yields 150,000 search results. Perhaps the least interesting statistic that the WHO generated… indeed, the item nearly at the bottom of the table… is what generated the largest number of headlines.

More to the point, whereas it is relatively easy to measure the number of deaths attributed to a first-order cause, such as malaria, there have been no deaths anywhere in the world that can be directly attributable to climate change. Yet even establishing how many people die from malaria is fraught with complications. They aren’t all counted. None of the statistics represented by the WHO’s research are empirical ‘facts’. They are all the result of projections, estimations, and assumptions, calculated from known data of varying quality.

But the result of the theoretical model is treated outside the scope of the study as an empirical result. It is presented as a fact that 150,000 people die a year from climate change. It is Armstrong’s starting point. Without it, she wouldn’t have a case. Or at least she wouldn’t have had one until late last week. Because that’s when Kofi Annan’s Global Humanitarian Forum launched its much-publicised report (pdf) revealing that it’s actually 300,000 people per year dying as a result of climate change.

These numbers are vitally important, because they provide a direct evidence-based link between culpability – those responsible for the emissions driving climate change – and victimhood, those who are suffering the consequences, including losing their lives […] The legal implications are analogous to those faced by the tobacco industry once evidence solidified about the links between smoking and cancer. Shareholders and investors in fossil fuels need to be aware that they now face a liability that will amount to hundreds of billions of dollars – their products are killing people, and it is only a matter of time before the wheels of international justice begin to turn.

Just like Franny Armstrong, Lynas grasps at the statistics as objective support for his politics. In his case it’s that those dirty oil companies are guilty of crimes against humanity and that he now sees a way to quantify those crimes. Of course, it’s pure fantasy. All one would have to do to counter his case would be to put together a report ‘estimating’ the number of lives saved each year by the burning of fossil fuels – through the provision of emergency services, heating, nutrition etc etc. But there’s the rub. The WHO isn’t going to carry out such a study. Just as it’s not going to carry out a study that comes up with a figure for the number of deaths caused by a stable climate. And nor is any celebrity diplomat with a charity at his disposal and connections at the highest level. As we say quite often, the politics is prior to the science. The WHO and Kofi Annan are responding to a hunger for statistics that confirm that climate change is real, happening and that something has to be done. Forget the starving millions, there are the appetites of directionless journalists, politicians, NGOs and diplomats to satisfy. Not to mention intergovernmental organisations such as the WHO itself. Neither the WHO nor the GHF have much to go on, of course, as they are quite prepared to admit in their respective reports. They do the best they can to cobble something together, shrouding their findings in caveats, qualifications, provisos and caution. But once the figures are out there, those caveats, qualifications, provisos and caution can be forgotten about. The job is done. Anyone is free to use these stats as they like. WHO won’t complain. Nor will Kofi Annan.

That’s the trouble with political consensuses. They are consensual. The only ones willing to challenge them are by definition outside of the consensus. And if you’re outside the political consensus, you’re a denier. And if you’re a denier, you can’t be trusted. Your money is corrupting. Your challenges can be written off as politically motivated. You can be ignored.

So, while the existence of a political consensus on climate change means that anyone who does not sign up to it is wrong by definition, the only ones who can possibly challenge that consensus are those who do not sign up to it. And indeed, even to try and challenge the consensus is evidence that one sits outside it and is, therefore, guilty of denialism.

It all leaves us in a farcical situation in which it does not matter what one’s own personal interests are, just as long as they incline one towards the proper sort of political bias. So, while just about the only group likely to make a case for the historical benefits of fossil fuels is the oil industry – who cannot be trusted because they are the fossil fuel industry – the press and politicians are more than happy to swallow the GHF report despite the fact that much of the crucial data on which its 300,000 figure is based is provided by insurance giants Munich Re, when risk insurers have as much interest in generating fear of climate change as Exxon has in generating doubt. And despite the fact that Munich Re’s data is highlyquestionable.

In the heat of the climate battle, excited activists like Armstrong and Lynas have absorbed

the numerical product of assumptions as concrete, cold, objective, hard, solid and unchallengeable, necessary facts about the world. These nebulous and often spurious assertions are taken out of any context in which they can be seen in proportion, and become the foundation of moral reasoning. In this way, the likes of Armstrong and Lynas project superficially plausible, but fundamentally flawed statistics into the future to make statements about what is happening in the present. Hence, Armstrong tells Miliband that he’s asking other people to sacrifice their lives so that we can go on holiday.

We might say, ‘ho hum, it’s just a couple of eco-loons’, nobody’s listening. But Miliband – a senior UK politician – is listening. He’s made two appearances with Armstrong recently: first at the launch of her film, and now at the Hay festival, apparently in order to demonstrate the UK government’s commitment to the environmental agenda. Why else would he be there? Try getting a politician such as Miliband to debate with a climate change ‘denier’, let alone a ‘sceptic’, let alone someone who’s critical of the politics. He would run a mile. Instead, he poses on stages with eco-warriors.

Even when she’s clearly mistaken, and trying to embarrass him, Miliband cannot point out to Armstrong that she’s a lunatic. He can neither challenge, nor expose her bogus way of thinking about things. He can’t assure the audience that she’s making stuff up, or taking things out of proportion, or that ‘one thing’ really does not ‘follow the other’, as she claims. Far from demonstrating the shallowness of the ‘one thing following the other’ argument, he instead tells Armstrong, that, yes, people aren’t going to give up their flights, but that he’s happy to make them more expensive:

I’m saying that we have to achieve the scientific… the… the… the cuts in emissions that science demands of us. And that is very important. But… but I’m saying that flying is the most difficult thing to tackle, partly technologically, err, speaking. I am saying that the price of airline tickets will go up including in the United Kingdom. We… we’re… it’s part of our emissions trading scheme, which means there is a price on err carbon emissions from aviation from the first… for the first time. I’m saying actually domestic flights will get much less err frequent, people will do them much less, and you got to expand high speed rail and you’ve got to have a big change in the relation to err public transport. But I am also saying that as someone in the art of persuasion, it… you know, you have probably twenty per cent of people in this country who are deeply committed on climate change. Maybe forty per cent who are… sort of… think it’s kind of… you know… right to do something but aren’t particularly engaged in it. And then a whole group of other people. In the art of persuasion, I’m not convinced that saying to people in my constituency, who are able to do something, and go to places that their parents could not have dreamed of, that that’s all got to end overnight is realistic. Which is what you’re saying.

Is it conceivable that the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change has not heard the ‘150,000 deaths from climate change’ factoid before? Of course he has. Can he really not know what its limitations are, and what criticisms have been made of it? Of course he does. But it wouldn’t be expedient to start challenging the very people he is turning to in the hope that they, through their films and through fear-mongery, will create support, and therefore legitimacy, for the policies he has devised.

He must think we’re stupid.

Here’s some more Stupid factoid tennis between Armstrong and Miliband.

Roger Pielke Jr reports that Al Gore is now presenting data from our favourite insurance company Munich Re to bolster his case that natural disasters are on the increase as a result of global warming.

Munich Re, if you remember, is a company that has rather a lot to gain from climate catastrophism, and that likes to interpret data rather more catastrophically when not constrained by the need for accuracy.

According to data collected by Munich Re, global weather-related economic losses (inflation adjusted, 2006 dollars) have increased from an annual average of U.S.$8.9 billion from 1977–1986 to U.S.$45.1 billion from 1997–2006. However, because of issues related to data quality, the low frequency of extreme event impacts, limited length of the time series, and various societal factors present in the disaster loss record, it is still not possible to determine the portion of the increase in damages that might be attributed to climate change brought about by greenhouse gas emissions (S1). This conclusion is likely to remain unchanged in the near future.

Gore switched to the Munich Re data in his lectures following criticism by Pielke and Andy Revkin that the data he had been using (from the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) in Belgium) to make the same point about human-induced natural disasters, did not actually support his case – criticism supported by CRED itself:

justifying the upward trend in hydro-meteorological disaster occurrence and impacts essentially through climate change would be misleading. Climate change is probably an actor in this increase but not the major one — even if its impact on the figures will likely become more evident in the future.

The strangest part of the story is that even senior scientists seem to have been taken in by Gore’s disaster porn. Writes Pielke:

Now that Gore has admitted that including the slide based on CRED data was a mistake, it raises a more fundamental [question]: How could it be that Al Gore presented obviously misleading information before a large audience of the world’s best scientists, which was then amplified in a press release by AAAS, and none of these scientists spoke up?

At the risk of getting all Exxon-Secrets ‘on yo asses’… Thanks to the reader who let us know about Bob Ward‘s latest career move. Ward, if you remember, left his post of director of communications at the Royal Society to join global risk analysis firm RMS as Director of Global Science Networks. It was a perfectly natural progression that allowed him to continue both his pseudo-scientific catastrophe-mongering and his crusade against Exxon and Martin Durkin. Which he did.

IDEAcarbon is an independent and professional provider of ratings, research and strategic advice on carbon finance. Our services are designed to provide leading financial institutions, corporations, governments, traders and developers with unbiased intelligence and analysis of the factors that affect the pricing of carbon market assets.

IDEAcarbon’s parent company is IDEAglobal, where Stern is Vice President.

Fankhauser doubles up as a member of the Climate Change Committee, the ‘independent’ body set up by the UK government to advise the UK government on climate policies.

The CCC is chaired by Lord Adair Turner of Ecchinswell, a man whose CV includes stints of environmental activism as a trustee for WWF and membership of the Advisory Board of Climate Change Capital, a firm offering services as an ‘investment manager and advisor specialising in the opportunities created by the transition to the low carbon economy’.

Professor Stern said: ’As scientists continue to play their role in analysing the causes and effects of climate change, it is crucial that social scientists take a lead in the building of policy. The Grantham Institute will produce high-quality, policy-relevant research, alongside a range of outputs designed to support policy development, raise public awareness and contribute to private-sector strategy formation.’

Climate Resistance would not stoop to suggest that the corporate and ideological interests of the Grantham Research Institute’s staff could conceivably influence the direction or quality of its research output.

In fact, it’s worth re-stating that we wouldn’t make so much of the financial interests of these folk were it not for the fact that Bob Ward and his cronies make so much about links with dirty oil money, as exemplified by Ward’s former boss at the Royal Society, Bob May, writing in the TLS:

Despite the growing weight of evidence of climate change, along with growing awareness of the manifold adverse consequences, there remains an active and well-funded “denial lobby”. It shares many features with the lobby that for so long denied that smoking is the major cause of lung cancer. […] Whoever got things started, this is a ball which ExxonMobile picked up and ran with, shuttling lobbyists in and out of the White House as it did so. Following earlier talks and seeking to exemplify its centuries-old motto – Nullius in Verba (which roughly translates as “respect the facts”) – the Royal Society recently and unprecedentedly wrote to ExxonMobile, complaining about its funding for “organisations that have been misinforming the public about the science of climate change”, and more generally for promoting inaccurate and misleading views – specifically that scientists do not agree about the influence of human activity on rising temperatures.

Likewise, we would be less interested in such dodgy dealings if it weren’t for the mainstream media’s tendency to decry Exxon funding as corrupting of the scientific method while deeming Munich Re’s pronouncements – let alone the pronouncements of those they sponsor – as above scrutiny. It’s also worth re-stating at this point that fear is to the insurance industry what oil is to Exxon.

The ESRC’s CCCEP is worthy of further comment. According to its home page:

Human-induced climate change could have enormous impacts on economies and societies if we persist with ‘business as usual’. This is the consensus view of climate scientists and one with which economists are increasingly finding agreement (eg The Stern Review). It is much less certain, however, that our economic, social and political systems can respond to the challenge. Will public, private and civic actors take action to create low-carbon economies? What emission reduction strategies will be efficient, equitable and acceptable? How much should we invest, and when, on measures to reduce vulnerability to climate change? Who will bear the costs and enjoy the benefits? […] The Centre is chaired by Professor Lord Stern of Brentford

So, Lord Professor Sir Nicholas Stern’s report on the economics of climate change is somehow representative of the ‘scientific consensus’, and he shall, therefore, chair the ESRC’s climate change body.

There was a time when the social sciences felt it necessary to scrutinise the natural sciences, on the basis that scientists weren’t quite as objective as they liked to think they were. They had a point, even if the scientists were probably more objective than the sociologists thought they were. It was a good fight. Now, however, the starting point of centrally-funded social science is that it accepts unconditionally that not only is there is a scientific consensus on climate change, but there is an economic one, too. Aren’t new-fangled scientific practices like consensuses and peudo-scientific creations like ‘sustainability’ precisely what the social sciences should be scrutinising?

The CCCEP assumes from the outset that it follows necessarily that something must be done – and, indeed, that is the duty of each of us to do something. From its mission statement:

Climate change and its potential impacts are increasingly accepted, but economic, social and political systems have been slow to respond. There is a clear and urgent need to speed up efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to unavoidable climate change.

The Centre’s mission is to respond to this need by advancing public and private action on climate change through innovative, rigorous research.

This is not sociology as the study of social institutions. It is sociology as government department, scholarly discipline and activist group all rolled into one. As if the Science Wars never happened, ‘climate science’ is free once again to speak ‘Truth to Power’ unfettered. Except that now it is aided and abetted by those who would be scrutinising it were it not for the fact that sociology has lost any sense of mission, just as political parties, the media, environmentalist activists and a host of scholarly disciplines attempting to justify themselves in terms of ‘relevance’ have lost sense of their mission.

The environmental orthodoxy is a tangled web of corporate interests, policy-makers, -movers and -shakers, academics, NGO’s and activists – all pushing in the same direction. Which would be just fine if the idea had been tested democratically. But it hasn’t. We’ve said it many times… environmentalism has not risen to prominence through its own energies: it has not developed from a mass movement; it isn’t representative of popular interests. It is useful only to various organisations that have otherwise struggled to justify themselves over the last few decades. The political parties have bought it. Various ‘radical’ organisations have bought it. Large sections of the media have bought it. Academic departments and funding agencies have bought it. Little wonder that corporate interests have been able to jump upon the bandwagon and play their hearts out for personal financial gain.

Further to our post on the love-in between Munich Re insurance the BBC and Professor Lord Sir Nicholas Stern…

Over at Prometheus, Roger Pielke Jr presents statistics that contradict Munich Re’s statements on increases in the human and economic costs of natural disasters:

Even as populations continue to grow, there has been no upward trend in the loss of life, despite the tragic reality of major disasters around the world every year. Extracting a climate change signal in that data is just not possible.

Intriguingly, Pielke has collaborated with Munich Re’s Peter Hoppe on economic costs, resulting in a paper in Science which concluded that:

According to data collected by Munich Re, global weather-related economic losses (inflation adjusted, 2006 dollars) have increased from an annual average of U.S.$8.9 billion from 1977–1986 to U.S.$45.1 billion from 1997–2006. However, because of issues related to data quality, the low frequency of extreme event impacts, limited length of the time series, and various societal factors present in the disaster loss record, it is still not possible to determine the portion of the increase in damages that might be attributed to climate change brought about by greenhouse gas emissions (S1). This conclusion is likely to remain unchanged in the near future.

In the BBC article we reported on, however, Hoppe is quoted as saying:

The weather machine runs into top gear, bringing more intense severe weather events with corresponding effects in terms of losses.

And his Munich Re colleague Torsten Jeworrek said:

This continues the long-term trend we have been observing. Climate change has already started and is very probably contributing to increasingly frequent weather extremes and ensuing natural catastrophes. These, in turn, generate greater and greater losses because the concentration of values in exposed areas, like regions on the coast, is also increasing further throughout the world.

As Pielke puts it:

So Munich Re scientists (Hoeppe and E. Faust) publish in Science that attribution of losses to greenhouse gas emissions is not presently possible, and a Munich Re board member says that such attribution is “very probably” leading to more extreme events.

He concludes:

The fact is that 2008 disaster losses tell us nothing about human-caused climate change. They offer no pressing reason for passing a climate treaty, since such a treaty can have no real effect on the climate for decades anyway. And even if it did the main reason for increasing losses is social not climatic. There are far better reasons for a global climate treaty than reducing disaster losses, since there are far better approaches to that end (as we argue in our Science paper). Further, there may be good reason for Munich Re to want to increase its rates, but making grossly unsound appeals to the spectre of greenhouse gas impacts on disasters in the near term will both harm its own credibility as a business, and potenially harm efforts to secure a global climate treaty, as overselling the science will inevitably result in a backlash.

The past year has been one of the most devastating ever in terms of natural disasters … climate change [is] boosting the destructive power of disasters like hurricanes and flooding

The report finds that:

Although there were fewer “loss-producing events” in 2008 than in the previous year, the impact of natural disasters was higher […]

More than 220,000 people died in events like cyclones, earthquakes and flooding, the most since 2004, the year of the Asian tsunami.

Meanwhile, overall global losses totalled about $200bn (£137bn), with uninsured losses totalling $45bn, about 50% more than in 2007.

This makes 2008 the third most expensive year on record, after 1995, when the Kobe earthquake struck Japan, and 2005, the year of Hurricane Katrina in the US.

The BBC article quotes expert Torsten Jeworrek:

“Climate change has already started and is very probably contributing to increasingly frequent weather extremes and ensuing natural catastrophes,”

Thing is, Torsten Jeworrek is an expert in insurance, not climate. He is on the board of insurance giants Munich Re. And Munich Re are the authors of the new report. It goes without saying that insurance companies need to keep abreast of developments in risk if they are to provide a service for their clients. But it also goes without saying that generating alarm about those same risks is also to their advantage. To paraphrase what we have said before, fear of risk is to Munich Re what oil is to Exxon. Indeed, Munich Re says as much on its website:

Risk is our business: Among other things, we reinsure the risks connected with oil rigs, satellites and natural catastrophes, and those arising from the use of genetic engineering and information technology or from the management of companies.

Climate change is not the only issue Munich Re is whipping up alarm about. It also desires that we flap over other scares du jour, such as piracy…

Munich Re is certainly not the first insurance company to try to cash in on climate alarm by generating more of it. Back in April 2007 we reported on the efforts of risk assessment giants Risk Management Solutions (RMS) to do the same. Bob Ward, RMS’s Director of Global Science Networks, was continuing a crusade against the dirty denialist industry – namely, Exxon and Martin Durkin – that he started while in his previous employment as Senior Manager for Policy Communication for Exxon-slayers the Royal Society.

What is surprising is that the BBC have deemed the witterings of an insurance company worthy of a news story, and moreover, that they have chosen to take those witterings entirely at face value. At the very least they could have wondered why earthquakes were lumped into the analysis or how much the figures were skewed by one devastating cyclone in Myanmar.

Torsten Jeworrek’s quotes – like the whole BBC story, in fact – are lifted directly from Munich Re’s press release. But then, perhaps the BBC didn’t have much choice (other than to ignore the story completely) because Munich Re haven’t actually made their report available. When we emailed them for a copy, media relations officer Alexander Mohanty replied that:

there is no additional report or publication.
Munich re’s annual report on natural catastrophes is a press relase only traditionally.
But we will publish a more in-depth report in march called ‘topics’.

The BBC has been known to argue that the existence of ‘the consensus’ on climate change means that they are not obliged to seek balancing viewpoints from anyone who doesn’t entirely sign up to it. With this story however, they seem to be going rather further than is necessary to live up to their own journalistic ideals. They back up Jeworrek’s comments with quotes from Peter Hoppe, head of Munich Re’s Geo Risks Research, which are also lifted verbatim from the presser:

“It is now very probable that the progressive warming of the atmosphere is due to the greenhouse gases emitted by human activity,” said Prof Peter Hoppe, head of Munich Re’s Geo Risks Research.

“The logic is clear: when temperatures increase there is more evaporation and the atmosphere has a greater capacity to absorb water vapour, with the result that its energy content is higher.

“The weather machine runs into top gear, bringing more intense severe weather events with corresponding effects in terms of losses.”

The company said world leaders must put in place “effective and binding rules on CO2 emissions” to curb climate change and ensure that “future generations do not have to live with weather scenarios that are difficult to control”.

Yes, ‘the logic is clear’…

– the world has been warming up a bit
– human activity probably has something to do with that
– some models say this might influence the frequency of severe weather events
– therefore, an expensive year for civilisation (and insurance companies) means that climate change is already happening
– therefore, we need a global agreement to reduce carbon emissions

Other than pointing out that Hoppe’s clear logic is clearly not, it’s hard to comment on the accuracy and rigour of Munich Re’s analysis, because, as we said, the analysis is not available for scrutiny. But it’s hard to see how an insurance company can have had more success than ‘the world’s 2500 top climate scientists’ at isolating the effect of climate change on the occurrence of severe weather events. But then again, perhaps we can look forward to the IPCC citing Munich Re on matters of climate-change induced weather patterns in its own reports in the future. And in a world where top scientists are wont to defer to economists on scientific matters of climate change, that is not such an unlikely possibility.

It is perhaps interesting that the economist in question, Professor Lord Sir Nicholas Stern, has rather a close working relationship with Munich Re. Understandably, Munich Re is rather proud of the fact that its dirty insurance money funds such a high profile environmentalist:

In 2008, Munich Re launched a cooperation with Professor Lord Nicholas Stern and the London School of Economics (LSE), the aim being to advance research into the economic impact of climate change.

And Prof Lord Sir Nicholas has nothing to be embarrassed about. Because nobody – least of all the BBC – seems at all bothered by any such conflict of interests. They are all too busy worrying about who Exxon is funding. Those who shriek the loudest about climate change – whether it’s insurance companies, Stern, the Royal Society, Lord Adair Turner or the Tickell dynasty – often have the most to gain from alarmism. It seems that the greens have been right all along: an economic tail really does wag the scientific dog.